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Ezra Klein, Sheila Liming, Loneliness, and Winnie-the-Pooh
To a man with a book, the whole world is about Winnie-the-Pooh. In this rerun of Ezra Klein’s 2023 podcast about what he calls the “The Quiet Catastrophe,” Klein talks about the loneliness “epidemic” with Sheila Liming, and about her book "Hanging Out: The Radical Power of Killing Time," and it just naturally dovetailed with “The House at Pooh Corner.” To be honest, what Klein and Liming consider a catastrophe I consider my happy place, but your mileage may vary. Continue reading →
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On Reading "The House at Pooh Corner"
A few days before Thanksgiving, I finished reading The House at Pooh Corner for the first time. I don’t remember being read to very much as a child, which may simply be a gap in my memory. My mother, who left school in 10th grade, wasn’t a big reader, so that makes sense; my father took us to the bookmobile that came to our neighborhood Monday evenings, and he’d read mostly biographies and sports books, and I inherited a few books that he owned as a child, but I just don’t remember him reading to me. Continue reading →
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Unboxing! 3rd Edition of my textbook "Introduction to Play Analysis"
When I left to take the dog for a walk this morning, I discovered a small, heavy box on the front porch. I hadn’t remembered ordering anything scheduled to arrive yet, but when I opened the box I found ten copies of the 3rd edition of my textbook, Introduction to Play Analysis! I’m delighted with this new edition, which really is a complete revisioning of the original. None of the analysis process is changed, but I’ve always felt as if the book would benefit from a demo of the analysis process “in action. Continue reading →
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Ivan Illich, John McKnight, and Asset-Based Communities
(This post is the result of writing I’ve been doing on my personal project.] I’ve been reading Ivan Illich’s 1970 classic Deschooling Society and John McKnight’s The Careless Society. I’ve admired the ideas of these two people over the years, but it wasn’t until recently that I discovered that they actually knew each other and that McKnight was greatly influenced by the time he spent with Illich. Reading the two books side by side (not literally! Continue reading →
